Trailer Weekly #63

Tags

Hosoda Mamoru, Kang Dong-won, The Hobbit

This is still last week’s Trailer Weekly – the actual one for today (#64) is in the works too, but probably won’t be finished quite in time for midnight. It’s been a busy week, I spent a lot of hours outdoors for work (freezing!) but I’m fortunately resistant enough not to get ill from that sort of thing (even when my socks end up wet, as they do quite often). With work keeping me busy and it also being the last week of term at uni, there wasn’t much filmwatching – I missed the KCCUK screening and I haven’t yet seen The Hobbit either (and won’t probably for another few weeks). The reviews for Peter Jackson’s latest Tolkien adaptation seem to be mixed (viewers feeling particularly ambivalent about the 48 fps format), but I wasn’t really expecting otherwise nor does it put it me off.

Hobbit Safe

Tags

Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson, The Hobbit, world premiere

The Hobbit countdown is on… it’s 24 days to go until the world premiere in New Zealand. While you wait and prepare to travel to Middle Earth, watch this latest video, courtesy of Air New Zealand. Although I always watch air safety videos/demonstrations (it’s like a personal ritual when I fly), for most people this will probably be the only safety video they’ll watch beginning to end…

So, what’s your favourite part?

P.S. Adore the accents!
P.P.S. I’ll take an elf steward any time!

Trailer Weekly #51 (Make-Up Trailer Weekly #3)

Tags

adaptation, BFI, BFI Film Festival, Film Festival, London, Studio Ghibli, The Hobbit, trailers

I’m finally getting in that third and final Trailer Weekly I had to make up for from my blogging hiatus in May. South Korea and Japan are back on the menu, which is chock-full with films on sensitive, controversial and intriguing issues: transgender identity, homosexuality, disproportionate age gaps in relationships, being female in a highly patriarchal society, surreal fables and meditations on silence and exile. It’s an eclectic and eccentric mix, but that’s how I like it.

Trailer Weekly #44

Tags

Peter Jackson, The Hobbit, trailers

Sunday, Sunday. I have made it to New Delhi by now, where it is hot (to the point of melting, but I don’t mind) with occasional bouts of monsoon rain (nothing too heavy yet although I’m hoping for more, not because of the heat, but because I rather like the monsoon). I am not actually on holiday, but I came due to my ever-present need not to stay just in one place as I get too restless (after-effect of being a TCK). I’m rather lucky that I have places I can go to relatively easily – my Dad is based for work here.

Not being in London does mean missing out on just about all August events, but I packed a pile of DVDs and hope I’ll get through at least some of them and also catch up on some of my review backlog. I say “hope” because I also brought a whole lot of other work for my PhD project, other academic research and editorial work and assignments for one of my freelance jobs. Yeah, not really a holiday. Well, at least I get to eat mangoes every day.

On to trailers: it’s a mixed batch this week – some which I can’t wait to see, others that I’m not quite sure about.

Trailer Weekly #40

Tags

BFI, Peter Jackson, The Hobbit

“Verregneter Sommer” is a good way of describing today. It’s mid-July, but it has been a semi-chilly, on again, off again rainy day, which really makes it seem not like summer at all. “Verregneter Sommer” actually is a bit hard to translate, “rainy summer” doesn’t really do it justice because “verregnet” means more something like “overly rainy” or “rainy again and again”. The Duden in fact makes it “durch zu lange andauernden Regen verdorben werden” (“to be ruined by rain that continuous for too long”, my translation), which veers a little too much towards the negative in my opinion. But, before this ends up being a pure vocabulary lesson, let’s also make it a literary one.

The Hobbit Countdown

Tags

adaptation, Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson, The Hobbit, Tolkien

On the set of The Hobbit: Peter Jackson and Martin Freeman (as Bilbo)

Over the weekend I went to visit a friend in Birmingham and somehow, in between φαβα (fava), Μελιτζανοσαλατα (Melitzanosalata) and Ratatouille (the Pixar movie, not the dish in this case) we ended up on the topic of The Hobbit, browsing the official blog and watching one of the production videos. This morning another one of those vlogs popped up (via the Guardian), giving us a tour around the studios where a lot of the filming has been taking place.

The Hobbit: Production Video #4 and 3-D Sketches

Tags

Peter Jackson, The Hobbit

Look at the image below with 3-D glasses.

3-D Concept Sketch for The Hobbit

Peter Jackson recently released Production Video #4 on the official The Hobbit Blog. It includes details on the technical aspects of filming in 3-D – and I love that Jackson names his cameras after real people (and animals too!). But the most interesting part of the video is the section on the 3-D drawings done by The Hobbit’s conceptual artists Alan Lee and John Howe.